The FIS Group is an independent IT service provider based in Grafenrheinfeld, Germany, that specializes in SAP projects and developing of efficient digitalization solutions for companies. As a certified SAP Gold Partner, FIS Informationssysteme und Consulting GmbH — the core company within the FIS Group — offers a comprehensive range of services, from consulting and implementation of SAP systems to their ongoing operation and support. The company places particular emphasis on technical wholesale, where it is the market leader in the DACH region with its FIS/wws all-in-one solution.
The FIS Group also includes the subsidiaries FIS-ASP and Medienwerft. FIS-ASP, based in Grafenrheinfeld, operates its own data centers and offers managed services, hosting and IT security services. Medienwerft, based in Hamburg, complements the Group's portfolio with expertise in e-commerce and brand communication and is also an SAP Gold Partner. In total, the FIS Group employs more than 850 people who work every day to make companies more modern, efficient and competitive.
At-a-Glance
FIS Group, a leading SAP® Gold Partner in Germany, is transforming how its enterprise clients use AI. By adopting SUSE AI, the company gained the infrastructure flexibility, security and transparency needed to build powerful, trustworthy AI solutions — from intelligent invoice processing to real-time recommendations. With SUSE's open, scalable AI platform, FIS can rapidly develop and deploy AI applications that meet the strict data privacy and compliance requirements of its customers — especially in highly regulated industries.
Developing AI solutions for SAP users
Since 2018, the FIS Group has been developing individual software solutions for SAP users based on machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). One of its first projects was automatic allocation of invoices. The solution can automatically assign incoming documents to the responsible persons and workflows within the SAP system based on defined recognition features. This speeds up internal processing and eliminates the need for manual sorting.
The FIS Group's AI experts have also implemented solutions for intelligent image recognition. For example, the team developed an application for a retail company that can identify different types of tiles in photos. A user uploads a photo of a hotel bathroom, and the solution automatically searches the retailer's product catalog for the tiles depicted. Thanks to advanced data vectorization technology, the solution achieves a very high recognition rate. In addition, the application can be seamlessly integrated into the customer's SAP application at the touch of a button.
Other use cases that the FIS Group has already implemented with AI technology include smart chatbots for support and knowledge management, solutions for master data cleansing and product categorization, and an intelligent recommendation engine. The latter is capable of analyzing user behavior in real time and providing personalized recommendations.
For some of these use cases, the FIS Group uses its own embedding model, FISMWASP. This model transforms complex information into a multidimensional vector space, capturing the relationships between data points. As a result, AI applications can more quickly identify similarities and connections and make more accurate, data-driven decisions.
FISMWASP can be trained for different use cases to meet individual customer requirements. “Our goal is to develop AI solutions that perfectly match our customers' processes and data,” says Manuel Sammeth, Managing Director of FIS-ASP and Head of the AI Competence Team within the FIS Group. “This is the only way we can help companies generate real added value for their business.”
“A major advantage of SUSE AI is that it significantly reduces the complexity of operating AI workloads. For example, we can manage different large language models via a central platform and implement new models for our customers very quickly when needed.”
Why SUSE solutions?
Recent developments in generative AI have significantly increased customer demand for intelligent tools and business applications. "There is a lot of interest in AI-powered solutions, but we also talk to companies whose AI projects have initially failed," says Sammeth. "Often there is a compelling idea, but those responsible do not think enough about the necessary infrastructure. As a result, they later find it difficult to scale the solution quickly enough and adapt it to changing needs."
Security can also be an obstacle to an AI strategy. SAP customers, in particular, place a high value on protecting sensitive data and keeping mission-critical applications running. Because of the sensitive data often stored in these applications, they are not necessarily willing to hand over their valuable business information to train an AI solution in the public cloud.
Finally, many companies are struggling to keep up with the rapid evolution of AI. New tools and models are being introduced almost every day, requiring AI leaders to constantly update their infrastructure to take advantage of the technology's capabilities. "This is exactly where we want to provide support as a partner," emphasizes Sammeth. "Our aim is to use the most appropriate components for each use case and to make them available to our customers securely and reliably."
To achieve maximum flexibility, efficiency and security in running AI applications, FIS Group chose SUSE AI. The open infrastructure platform by SUSE supports rapid development, secure execution and seamless scaling of AI workloads, both on-premises and in the cloud. SUSE AI is built on secure open source technologies, a validated software supply chain and end-to-end traceability of data processing. As a result, the platform provides complete control and sovereignty when deploying AI solutions.
“What convinced us was that the SUSE AI platform is built on SUSE Rancher Prime, includes SUSE Security and comes with observability built for AI,” says Sammeth. The FIS Group, which had already had a positive experience with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications, plans to run all of its AI workloads on the SUSE AI platform.
The impact of working with SUSE AI
Enables efficient and flexible management of the AI infrastructure
“A major advantage of SUSE AI is that it significantly reduces the complexity of operating AI workloads,” explains Sammeth. ”For example, we can manage different large language models via a central platform and implement new models for our customers very quickly when needed. SUSE AI’s integrated orchestration, monitoring and lifecycle management tools eliminate a lot of manual effort, which significantly shortens the development time for innovative AI applications."
SUSE AI is a cloud native, extensible platform that is also tightly integrated with SUSE Virtualization, SUSE Edge and SUSE Storage. This architecture enables the flexibility to scale as customer needs grow. Whether additional Kubernetes clusters, hyperconverged infrastructure for virtual machines or more storage capacity is needed, FIS Group can quickly allocate the resources needed for any AI application.
Sammeth also appreciates the open architecture: "SUSE AI allows us to remain technologically flexible and benefit from new developments early on. The SUSE AI Library provides FIS Group with curated access to innovative open source AI components, secured by the SUSE secure supply chain. These include powerful tools such as Ollama for managing large language models (LLMs), Milvus as a vector database for large amounts of data and Open WebUI and MLflow for efficiently managing machine learning workflows. The components of the SUSE AI Library make it easier for the FIS Group to train complex AI models and run them across platforms without vendor lock-in.
Meets high-security, data protection and compliance requirements
SUSE AI also helps FIS Group ensure that security and compliance requirements are met when deploying AI applications. "Many of our customers are in highly regulated industries and have chosen not to outsource their SAP environment to the public cloud for privacy reasons," says Sammeth. "Instead, they run their business applications in our protected data centers in Germany. This is where the AI applications they need for their business will run in the future — securely and in compliance with data privacy regulations."
With SUSE AI and SUSE Security, FIS Group can secure the entire lifecycle of AI applications, from development to deployment to production. SUSE Security protects the processing of sensitive data, provides a secure runtime environment for containerized AI workloads and monitors communication between services and components. For example, FIS Group can prevent LLMs from being tampered with through prompt injection or other attack methods, potentially exposing sensitive information such as passwords or credit card data.
SUSE AI also helps the FIS Group build trust and ethical standards into its AI applications. Guardrails play a key role in this. These security and control mechanisms ensure that AI models act in a reliable, ethical and rule-compliant manner, for example, by not providing discriminatory answers.
SUSE AI enables guardrails technology through the Guardrails AI open source project, providing organizations a way to build customized policies and checks directly into their AI workflows to prevent bias, improve traceability and ensure output is aligned with user intent.
Provides real-time visibility into AI workloads for stable and cost-efficient operations
"As a pioneer in AI, we're often faced with a balancing act," says Sammeth. "On the one hand, customers expect short development cycles, but on the other hand, they count on the proven quality of an enterprise service provider. SUSE AI helps us meet both expectations. In particular, SUSE Observability capabilities in SUSE AI make it easier for us to reliably deliver innovative AI applications and fulfill our service level agreements."
SUSE Observability in SUSE AI comes with built-in AI observability that includes tools for real-time monitoring, analysis and optimization of AI workloads — without requiring changes to the application code. It offers detailed insights into the status of models, data, systems and GPUs, and tracks key metrics such as token usage and LLM performance. Predefined dashboards present data on cost, performance and resource utilization, which is particularly useful for managing large AI models in production.
"This information allows us to identify performance bottlenecks early and take corrective action before the performance or availability of our AI applications is impacted," says Sammeth. "The insights provided by AI observability are also valuable for analyzing anomalies and investigating security incidents. Finally, the solution gives us complete visibility into token and GPU usage, which is important for accurately allocating service costs."
What’s next for FIS Group?
The FIS Group currently sees significant potential for AI solutions in production and logistics environments, as well as in wholesale and retail. However, these use cases require a suitable edge infrastructure to enable secure, real-time data processing close to the source.
"SUSE helps us deploy AI applications efficiently at the edge and process data directly where it is generated," says Sammeth. "The combination of SUSE AI and SUSE Edge enables us to run containerized AI workloads securely and reliably in edge environments. This allows us to bring the benefits of AI-driven workflows to logistics centers, production lines or retail stores with minimal latency."
A related initiative at the FIS Group focuses on SAP customers who need to process business-critical data and workflows across distributed sites. In the future, the company plans to use SAP Edge Integration Cell, a locally installable runtime environment that brings the capabilities of the SAP Integration Suite to edge environments, without transferring sensitive data or interfaces to the cloud. With Rancher Prime and the SUSE Linux Micro operating system, SUSE provides an SAP-validated technology stack for securely and efficiently operating the SAP Edge Integration Cell at any location.
"Especially in regulated industries, it's essential that companies maintain full control over their data," adds Sammeth. "The SAP Edge Integration Cell, combined with SUSE’s edge infrastructure, offers the ideal foundation: enabling local data processing, ensuring high levels of data security and minimizing response times — while maintaining tight integration with existing SAP landscapes."